ABERDEEN headquartered well engineering and project management firm, Zenith Energy, has started operations on a six-month contract in Morocco worth an estimated £1million in value.

The
contract, with SDX Energy Morocco, is a 12-well onshore drilling project in the
north of the country, near the city of Kenitra, which is 50 miles north of
Rabat.

Zenith is project managing the drilling campaign, which includes well planning, overseeing equipment requirements and procurement, as well as contracts with third party services and rig inspection. The Zenith team of 10 will also provide engineering support and well site supervision throughout operations.

Zenith onshore rig

Chris
Collie, operations director from Zenith Energy said: “We have completed the well
planning and preparation phase and commenced operations on the first well. There is not a large oil and gas industry in
Morocco, so we have mobilised equipment from across the world, including
Canada, China, Russia and the UK, to allow us to deliver the project
expectations during the coming six months.

“There have been a few challenges that we have overcome for SDX. We have designed the wells specifically to reduce the overall well cost, we have sourced high-performance equipment and crews to reduce the campaign length and we have carried out a large amount of analysis on the geological and offset data which will allow us to deliver safe and efficient wells for our client.”

Planning
work on the remote onshore project, which includes vertical and deviated wells,
began February 2019, with completion of drilling operations expected in Q1 2020. It is the third project that Zenith has
coordinated with SDX, with the full project management of four onshore wells in
Egypt last year, and another onshore well in Egypt in 2017.

It
is one of three significant projects that the company has been working on
throughout 2019 in the UK, Australia and Morocco.

Zenith
Energy provides specialist
expertise for the complete well life cycle from the conceptual design phases
through to field development planning, well operations, well intervention and
well abandonments.

Launched in 2012, Zenith
is based in Aberdeen’s Bon Accord Square and has another office in Perth,
Australia. In recent years, Zenith
expanded its client base and successfully completed work in the
UK, Egypt, Italy Equatorial Guinea and Australia, and currently works with over
45 clients in 21 countries .